VIII
For the first.—It seems to me that Thackeray—a social delineator or nothing—never quite understood the roots of English life or of the classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in Pall Mall or Piccadilly or the Houses of Parliament ramify underground deep and out, fetching their vital sap from the countryside. Walter Bagehot, after quoting from Venus and Adonis Shakespeare’s famous lines on a driven hare, observes that “it is absurd to say we know nothing about the man who wrote that: we know he had been after a hare.” I cannot find evidence in his works that this child, brought from Calcutta to Chiswick, transferred to the Charterhouse (then by Smithfield), to Cambridge, Paris, Fleet Street, Club-land, had ever been after a hare: and if you object that this means nothing, I retort that it means a great deal: it means that he never “got off the pavement.” It means that he is on sure ground when he writes of Jos. Sedley, demi-nabob, but on no sure ground at all when he gets down to Queen’s Crawley: that in depicting a class—now perhaps vanishing—he never, for example, got near the spirit that breathes in Archdeacon Grantly’s talk with his gamekeeper:
“I do think, I do indeed, sir, that Mr. Thorne’s man ain’t dealing fairly along of the foxes. I wouldn’t say a word about it, only that Mr. Henry is so particular.”
“What about the foxes? What is he doing with the foxes?”
“Well, sir, he’s a trapping on ’em. He is, indeed, your reverence. I wouldn’t speak if I warn’t well nigh mortial sure.”
Now the archdeacon had never been a hunting man, though in his early days many a clergyman had been in the habit of hunting without losing his clerical character by doing so; but he had lived all his life among gentlemen in a hunting county, and had his own very strong ideas about the trapping of foxes. Foxes first, and pheasants afterwards, had always been the rule with him as to any land of which he himself had had the management.... But now his heart was not with the foxes,—and especially not with the foxes on behalf of his son Henry. “I can’t have any meddling with Mr. Thorne,” he said; “I can’t and I won’t ... I’m sure he wouldn’t have the foxes trapped.”
“Not if he knowed it, he wouldn’t, your reverence. A gentleman of the likes of him, who’s been a hunting over fifty year, wouldn’t do the likes of that; but the foxes is trapped ... a vixen was trapped just across the field yonder, in Goshall Springs, no later than yesterday morning.” Flurry was now thoroughly in earnest; and, indeed, the trapping of a vixen in February is a serious thing.
“Goshall Springs don’t belong to me,” said the archdeacon.
“No, your reverence; they’re on the Ullathorne property. But a word from your reverence would do it. Mr. Henry thinks more of the foxes than anything. The last word he told me was that it would break his heart if he saw the coppices drawn blank....”
“I will have no meddling in the matter, Flurry.... I will not have a word said to annoy Mr. Thorne.” Then he rode away....
But the archdeacon went on thinking, thinking, thinking. He could have heard nothing of his son to stir him more in his favour than this strong evidence of his partiality for foxes. I do not mean it to be understood that the archdeacon regarded foxes as better than active charity, or a contented mind, or a meek spirit, or than self-denying temperance. No doubt all these virtues did hold in his mind their proper places, altogether beyond contamination of foxes. But he had prided himself on thinking that his son should be a country gentleman.... On the same morning the archdeacon wrote the following note:—
Dear Thorne,—My man tells me that foxes have been trapped on Darvell’s farm, just outside the coppices. I know nothing of it myself, but I am sure you’ll look to it.—
Yours always,
T. Grantly.
Absurd? Very well—but you will never understand the politics of the last century—that era so absurdly viewed out of focus, just now, as one of mere industrial expansion—unless you lay your account with it better than Thackeray did. As you know, he once stood for Parliament, as Liberal candidate for the City of Oxford: and it is customary to rejoice over his defeat as releasing from party what was meant for mankind. In fact he never had a true notion of politics or of that very deep thing, political England. Compare his sense of it—his novelist’s sense—with Disraeli’s. He and Disraeli, as it happens, both chose to put the famous-infamous Marquis of Hertford into a novel. But what a thing of cardboard, how entirely without atmosphere of political or social import, is Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair as against Lord Monmouth in Coningsby!